Accidental Gods

40 Episodes
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By: Accidental Gods

Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone - it is never coming back. We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine, and by doing so, create a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn. What happens if we commit to a world based on the values we care about: compassion, courage, integrity? What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the...

Still In the Eye of the Storm: Finding Calm and Stable Roots with Dan McTiernan of Being EarthBound
#11
Last Wednesday at 5:00 AM

As the only predictable thing is that things are impossible to predict now, how do we find a sense of grounded stability, a sense of safety, a sense of embodied connection to the Web of Life?  This is the single most important thing we can be doing now, and this week's guest, Dan McTiernan, is one of those who is leading courses, trainings and embodied meditations that give people a genuinely grounded set of resources to feel this at a cellular, bone-deep level so that it can become the foundation for a life of authentic practice.

Dan's m...


Sit with the River, Breathe Sacred Smoke, Love with the World: Building a Bioregional world with Joe Brewer
#10
06/25/2025

How can Bioregionalism supplant the nation state as the natural unit of civilisation? Joe Brewer is living, breathing and teaching the ways we can work together with each other and the natural flows of water and life.

We know that the current paradigm is breaking apart in real time, but how do we become the light that shines through the cracks?  How do we build ways of being that reunite us with the web of life, create new/old ways of letting value flow and become what humanity has been and could be: stewards of that massive, m...


Solstice Meditation 2025 - Sun Stands Still - by Manda Scott
#9
06/21/2025

Here is a meditation for the Solstice – the moment when the sun stands still.

It is suitable for Summer and Winter solstice. 

You don't have to do this at the exact moment of stillness: it’s the connection that counts, the marking of the turning point from days lengthening to shortening (or vice versa if you’re in the southern hemisphere).  This is a moment of reflection and a re-affirming of our connection to the web of life. 

You don’t have to limit yourself to one pass through – please feel free to explore this...


Thoughts from the Solstice Edge: Turning the Page on a Dying System with Manda Scott
#9
06/21/2025

As we head into the solstice- that moment when the sun stands still—whether you're in the northern hemisphere where we have the longest day, or the southern, where it's the longest night—this solstice feels like a moment of transformation.

The world is turning over, turning a page. The old system is visibly—palpably—breaking apart. A new system will arise from the ashes, because there is always going to be a system. The question is what it looks like, works like, feels like. We are a prosocial, communitarian species, but our culture has shattered from our know...


Falling in Love with the Future - with author, musician, podcaster and futurenaut, Rob Hopkins
#9
06/18/2025

Our guest this week, Rob Hopkins, is a towering figure in the world of regenerative change.  Co-founder of Transition Network and of Transition Town Totnes, he is host of the podcast 'From What if to What Next', stars in the groundbreaking French film 'Demain', speaks at TED Global and TEDx events and most recently, has created a collaborative music project with artist Mr Kit, ‘Field Recordings from the Future‘ which will be released on 17th of May 2025, alongside his new book,‘How to Fall in Love with the Future’.

With the subtitle, 'A Time Traveller's Guide to Changing...


ReWilding our Water: From Rain to River to Sewer and back with Tim Smedley, author of The Last Drop
#8
06/11/2025

If you listen to this podcast for any length of time, you'll know that I believe the way forward is predicated on our finding shared values—I'd go for integrity, compassion, courage and generosity of spirit as the baselines—and then a suite of clear asks in the outer world and needs in the inner world.  In logistical terms, at an absolute baseline, we need Clean Air, Clean Water, Clean Soil. These are non negotiable and the fact that we currently have none of these is a grim indictment of how much we live in an economy that sucks the l...


This is how we build the future: Teaching Regenerative Economics at all levels with Jennifer Brandsberg-Engelmann
#7
06/04/2025

How do we let go of the sense of scarcity, separation and powerlessness that defines the ways we live, care and do business together? How can we best equip our young people for the world that is coming - which is so, so different from the future we grew up believing was possible?

This week's guest, Jennifer Brandsberg-Engelmann is an educator, regenerative - and I would say renegade - economist who is Project Lead at the Regenerative Economics for Secondary Schools and Lead Author of the online textbook of the same name. Jennifer has taught economics for...


Brilliant Minds: BONUS podcast with Kate Raworth, Indy Johar & James Lock at the Festival of Debate
#6
05/31/2025

We are honoured to bring to Accidental Gods, a recording of three of our generation's leading thinkers in conversation at the Festival of Debate in Sheffield, hosted by Opus.

This is an unflinching conversation, but it's absolutely at the cutting edge of imagineering: this lays out where we're at and what we need to do, but it also gives us roadmaps to get there:  It's genuinely Thrutopian, not only in the ideas as laid out, but the emotional literacy of the approach to the wicked problems of our time. 

Now we have to make it ha...


Farm as Church, Land as Lover: Community. farming and food with Abel Pearson of Glasbren
#6
05/28/2025

We all know the future rests upon us building heart-grounded, spirit-led communities that link humanity to the Web of Life. We know that the key to this is building reciprocal relationships with our food and the land from which it comes.  Doing this is…harder.  So this week, we're speaking with Abel Pearson of Glasbren.  Abel is a friend of the podcast - we last spoke in the depths of the pandemic when he was farming 3 acres and beginning to feed the local community in ways that helped the people in a ten mile radius really to connect with the s...


Working from the Inside Out: Paths to Personal and Global Transformation with Renée Lertzman
#5
05/21/2025

We've known for decades that the 'Yell, Tell and Sell' strategy of belittling people, endeavouring to cajole—or shame—them into some kind of change doesn't work - in fact it can't work.  It's not how we're wired.  Cognitive neuroscience has been telling us this for decades but it's only recently that people have begun to listen. One of those who has been speaking in the wilderness for a long time—and is now finally being heard—is this week's guest, Renée Lertzman.

Dr. Renée Lertzman is a researcher, advisor and strategist who translates relational psychology t...


The Others Within Us: Meeting our Spirit Guides and other entities with Bob Falconer
#4
05/14/2025

Our world is more magical than we know - more than we can know.  Increasing numbers of us are realising that the 'citadel theory of mind' where we see ourselves as isolated units within the boundaries of our own skulls is not how the world works.  But if it isn't, then how do we make sense of the worlds beyond consensus reality? How do we engage with the web of life and all that's around it in ways that are respect, reciprocal and generative?

Robert (Bob) Falconer is a long time IFS practitioner and trainer.  He is the...


Radical Change: Building a Parallel Economy with Peter Kemp of Citizen Coin
#3
05/07/2025

We are living through a time between stories—where the old economic narratives of scarcity, extraction, and separation are crumbling, and a new one is seeking to be born. At the heart of this transition is the question: What do we truly value, and how do we express that value in ways that nourish life?

Imagine a society where every act of care, contribution, and kindness is not only appreciated but economically recognised. Schools, councils, and local businesses become part of an ecosystem where value flows back and forth amongst the people who create it. This doesn’t re...


Beyond Zero Sum: Rehumanising our Conflicts with Carm Aufderheide of NorthStar Training Solutions
#2
04/30/2025

All flourishing is mutual, that's a given. And yet the schisms in our culture, the tribal divides and limbic hijack seem to grow deeper and more powerful by the day. 

It doesn't have to be like this.  We do have the tools of connection, of genuine listening, of offering trust to gain trust and offering respect to gain respect, we just need to know how  - and when - to put them into practice.  If we're going to move forward into that future we'd be proud to leave behind, we need to start practicing these skills as if t...


Red Pill/Blue Pill, Green Pill/True Pill – Creating a Media Commons with Debs Grayson of Opus Independents
#1
04/23/2025

Our legacy - or status quo - media is owned and run by billionaires for billionaires and the stories they promote are the ones that will keep us all in line. How do we shift the global narrative towards a future of mutual flourishing?

It is axiomatic of this podcast that stories – the good and the bad – are what got us to where we are. We are a storied species. Everything we do arises from the stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves, each other and our relationship with the communities of place, purpose and pass...


How to Save the World - tipping points of social diffusion with Katie Patrick of Hello World Labs
#16
04/16/2025

'If you're not changing the numbers, you're not changing the world.' So says this week's guest, Katie Patrick. Katie Patrick is a Silicon Valley based environmental engineer, climate action designer, and author of How to Save the World: How to Make Changing the World the Greatest Game We've Ever Played, now taught in Harvard University’s graduate program and top recommended reading material by UNEP.

Katie specializes in designing innovative apps, dashboards, and campaigns that drive environmental action by leveraging insights from behavioural science and game design. Her work combines rigorous research with creative execution to de...


Bonus: Thoughts from the Edge - If the current system is not fit for purpose, what's our core response?
#15
04/12/2025

Suppose we accept that the current system is not broken - it is doing what it was always designed to do - which is to shovel wealth and power from the many to the few at a human scale and from the more-than-human world to the industrial/technical maw of predatory capitalism at an ecological scale.

This is a death cult and it is in its death throes, but it will take us all down with it if we let it.

Suppose then, we accept that, while the current system may not be broken, it...


Wellbeing: It’s about wholeness, not happiness - with Dr Mark Fabian, author of Beyond Happy
#15
04/09/2025

We grow up thinking we want to be happy (or at least, not-sad).  But happiness isn't enough. What we need is wellbeing, and as Dr Mark Fabian quotes in the dedication to his book, Beyond Happy, "Wellbeing is about wholeness, not happiness, and wholeness is so much more demanding than happiness.'

So what is wholeness, and what does it demand of us? As the old world crumbles and the new is struggling into being, what steps can each of us take to bring ourselves ever closer to a sense of being complete?

This week's g...


A Longing for Belonging: Shifting the Cultural Paradigm with Looby Macnamara and Leona Johnson
#14
04/02/2025

If we are in the midst of the Great Derangement (thank you Amitav Ghosh), what tools do we have to help us shape a system that is actually fit for purpose? Who are our elders and what can they teach us? How do we learn to listen to our heart's (and hearts') desire and shape the communities of place, passion and purpose that will allow us to emerge into a different culture?

Our two guests this week live and work at the heart of a global movement for cultural change.  Looby Macnamara is the co-founder of the C...


Now Then! Building networks of citizen power with James Lock of Opus in Sheffield
#13
03/26/2025

We all know the current system of predatory capitalism is not fit for purpose.  We don't (yet) all agree on how to fix it, but for sure, no problem is solved from the mindset that created it.  So how do we begin to compost the debris of the failing system to grow something constructive, generative, connected communities that can act as a bridge from where we are towards that future we'd be proud to leave behind?

James Lock is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Opus Independents Ltd, a not-for-profit social enterprise, working in culture, politics and th...


Be More Hawk! Being the courage to follow what's right with Rachel Musson of ThoughtBox Education
#12
03/19/2025

The old systems are no longer fit for purpose. What does an education system look like that's fit for the twenty-first century - where we put self care, people care, earth care at the heart of what we do?

This week's guest, Rachel Musson, has made it her life's work to fashion ways of learning for all ages that put this Triple Wellbeing principle into action. In everything she does, from leading ThoughtBox Eduction, to creating the Transforming Leadership Course, to writing her glorious, inspiring children's books, to her podcast, Two Inconvenient Women, with her fellow Thoughtboxer...


Miraculous Carbon: Celebrating the Book of Life, Death and Potential with author Paul Hawken
#11
03/12/2025

How do we step past the magical thinking of the elites that says we can either use AI to 'Solve for Climate' - or just ignore the entire climate and ecological emergency completely?

This week's guest, Paul Hawken, has been at the forefront of intelligent responses to the entire meta-crisis for decades. He has been profiled or written in hundreds of articles in the biggest newspapers across the world and has written nine books, six of which have become bestsellers, including Blessed Unrest, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation and Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan...


Authentically human: celebrating the magic of life with Mark McCartney of the 'What is a Good Life' podcast
#10
03/05/2025

In these turbulent times, what values most strongly underpin our humanity and how can we nurture our relationships with all parts of ourselves, with ourselves and other people and with ourselves and the web of life?

This week's guest is another podcaster.  Mark McCartney is host of the 'What is a Good Life' podcast, which is now into well over 100 episodes. Mark is a coach and writer based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. He started his 'What is a Good Life' project in 2021,  it became a podcast soon and now, in it's fourth year, he's interviewed over 250 pe...


Seeing the Bigger Picture: psychedelics and sense-making with Alexander Beiner of Kainos
#9
02/26/2025

How do we shed the shackles of modernity and step into a new set of stories that could help us grow into the fullness of our potential?

Alexander Beiner is one of a small band of people in our culture who is shaping the cutting edge of possibility, crafting new ideas of who we are, at the deepest levels of our Self and out into the widest view of our place as conscious nodes in the web of life.
Ali is an author, journalist and facilitator focused on bringing new ways of seeing and being from...


Becoming Spiritual Warriors: exploring a politics of radical Compassion with Jamie Bristow
#8
02/19/2025

In a world of turmoil where the only certainty is uncertainty, what happens if we who yearn for a future we'd be proud to leave behind began really to speak the quiet part out loud? What happens if we acknowledge the meaning crisis of our culture and state clearly that we need a world based on Love: on the raw, wild, wonder of life itself? And what happens if we shape our politics around this, instead of defensive attempts to make the death cult of predatory capitalism feel less... deathly?

This week's guest, Jamie Bristow is someone...


Kin-centric Rewilding 2 - Bonus - continuation of the conversation with Daniel Firth Griffith
#7
02/12/2025

Daniel remains one of the few people I know who is originally of the Trauma Culture but is living absolutely integral to his land - and we couldn't keep our conversation confined to 60 minutes. So we broke at an appropriate point and came back. This is the second part - please do listen to the first if you've only just found us - we literally paused the recording, took a breath and continued…

As ever, if you're interested in Daniel's work visit his website. And if you have the means, do buy his books, they are genuinely be...


Kin-centric Rewilding - restoring relationship to the land and ourselves with Daniel Firth Griffith, author of StagTine
#7
02/12/2025

By now we know that we need to connect to the More than Human world. We know we need to grow into adulthood and elder hood. We know we need to move from a Trauma Culture to an Initiation Culture.  But knowing these things is not the same as living them as a reality.  To get here, we need waymakers, people of huge heart and raw courage to walk away from the limited, goal-based directions of our culture and step into the ways of being where we meet in open-hearted, full-hearted, strong-hearted relationship with the land and all that li...


Find the Others! Beyond the Death of Democracy lies Citizen Power - with Jon Alexander of the Citizen Collective
#6
02/05/2025

Democracy is breaking around us in real time and a small percentage of those in power would like us to become - at best - obedient subjects in a world dedicated to the destruction of ecosystems and the annihilation of compassion, empathy and all that makes us thrive. 

Clearly, we are better than this. So how can we harness the astonishing wonder of human co-creation in service to life and a world where humanity thrives as part of a flourishing web of life?

This week's guest, Jon Alexander started off his professional life as a h...


Of Schoolishness, Space and Emergence into vibrant systems: a joint podcast with Tim Logan of Future Learning Design
#5
01/29/2025

If what our culture most urgently needs is for a critical mass of us to grow into adults and then elders, how can we help our young people to step beyond the artificial boundaries of our old, rigid system into a world where they are fully connected to all parts of themselves, each other and the web of life. How, in effect, can we create an educational system that is fit for purpose in the emerging century?


In this podcast, I joined with Tim Logan, host of the Future Learning Design podcast, educator, part of the...


Living through the Death of Democracy: Manda's thoughts on love, liberty and the continued existence of complex life on earth
#4
01/25/2025

We are living through the death of democracy and the onset of Techno-Feudalism.  But this is not a time when linear systems can hold and feudalism was nothing if not linear. So how can we be part of a transformative process that will let us lay the foundations for a future we'd be proud to leave behind?

Usually, on Accidental Gods, we talk to guests who seem to exemplify some aspect of the generative edge of interbecoming change that will take us towards the emergent future we need if we're not only to survive, but thrive. 

...


HeartFood - Healing our communities with Food grown on Regenerative Farms with Erin Martin of FreshRxOK
#4
01/22/2025

What happens when people with chronic, unstable diabetes eat food grown in local, regenerative farms? Erin Martin talks to the Accidental Gods podcast about the dramatic and spectacular improvements in health her group FreshRxOK saw in Oklahoma when they instigated a 'Food as Medicine' programme, offering real food with good nutrient density to diabetic patients in some of the poorest communities.

An Oklahoman on track to be a lawyer, Erin’s first job in a retirement community inspired her to pursue a degree in gerontology instead. During her Masters program at USC, Erin ran a team of ad...


Radical Creativity: creating a Global Council of Women with Jenny Grettve of EIT Culture and Creativity
#3
01/15/2025

How can we bring wisdom to those with power and power to those with wisdom?  If we were to step into elder hood and bring the best of ourselves to the table, could we create governance structures that would help to heal our cultural divides, create equity and guide is wisely through the coming crisis?

Jenny Grettve believes we can and has set up a global council to make this happen. 

Jenny is a good friend of the podcast. She joined us in episode #228 to talk about designing and building a school along Doughnut economic li...


The Phoenix Always Rises: Evolving into the Future Human with Prof Chris Bache, Author of LSD and the Mind of the Universe
#2
01/08/2025

This podcast is predicated on the belief that if we all work together, we can still lay the foundations for a future we'd be proud to leave as our legacy.  And it's becoming increasingly obvious that this is now urgent; that we need to let go of the assumptions we'd made about career paths or future constructs and give ourselves wholeheartedly to the process of making it through. Five years ago when we began, it was possible to imagine that the world might stabilise with a vestige of the old system as a scaffold for the new.  That assumption is...


Democracy Rising: Making 2025 the year we recover from Peak Polarisation with Audrey Tang, Ambassador at Large for a safer, kinder world
#1
01/01/2025

Is it possible that 2024 might have been the year of 'Peak polarisation' around the world and that from hereon in humanity might grow less divided, not more; that we might use technology and social media wisely to bring the best of ourselves to the table, becoming the best we can be in service to life?  Audrey Tang certainly thinks so in this wide-deep, mind-expanding conversation, we explore everything from the dual nature of AGI to the potential for liberational  education that gives young people a sense of agency, interaction and the common good, to ways to rescue democracy to re...


Heart of Oak: Talking Druidry, Spirituality and the nature of Magic in the MetaCrisis with Philip Carr-Gomm
#14
12/25/2024

Druidry is the indigenous spirituality of the islands of Britain, but how does is live in the contemporary world? What are the values and practices that make it so suited to the inflexion point of the moment? Why - and how - does it mesh so well with other, more spiritual traditions? And how does the practice of Will, the honing of intent, create the magic we need to see in our world?

This week's guest, Philip Carr-Gomm, has spent his life studying, and writing about all of these things. Philip began studying Druidry as a spiritual...


Seven Generations Perspective Meditation for December 2024
#13
12/18/2024

Traditionally, we have offered a meditation for the solstice - and these are available in the links below.

This meditation aims to offer a long-wide-deep perspective on our place as conscious nodes in the web of life - the journey that brought us here and the places humanity may go.  Please give yourself plenty of time both to experience the journey and to reflect afterwards. If it helps to write down your feelings, images, ideas or sensations afterwards, please do.


Winter Solstice Meditation  https://media.transistor.fm/25cbf6e7/e9f16280.mp3


Solstice Cheer: Three Friends uphold a Podcasting Tradition with Della Duncan, Nathalie Nahai and Manda Scott
#13
12/18/2024

This is the fifth year of our traditional Winter Solstice podcast gathering in which Nathalie Nahai of 'In Conversation with Nathalie Nahai, Della Duncan of The Upstream Podcast and I sit around our virtual dark-nights fire to reflect on the podcasting year just gone and explore what has changed for us since the last time we three met in one place.  By any measure, this year has been pretty turbulent and our capacity to predict anything at all for 2025 is fairly ragged, but that doesn't stop us from celebrating Della's news, and sharing the ways we find stability and m...


Must Read, Must Listen, Must View: Manda's favourite books, podcasts and videos this Winter Season
#12
12/14/2024


It's that time of year - when all we really want is to curl up and reflect, go inside, become the potential that will arise in the unfolding spring.  If you want things to listen to or watch or read as you head into the long-nights, then these are (some of) the things that have caught my attention this year. Enjoy!


Books:

Non-Fiction
Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machada de Oliviera https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/hospicing-modernity-parting-with-harmful-ways-of-living-vanessa-machado-de-oliveira/6401710?ean=9781623176242
Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for the End of the World as w...


The Power of (good) Food with Nick Weir of the Open Food Network
#13
12/11/2024

Clearly we're at an inflection point in the history of humanity.  Our experiment with a notional democracy is failing and either we find something that actually works, or we sink into autocracy. And given that the current global flavour of autocracy is in deep denial of the climate and ecological catastrophe that's currently underway, then that's a pretty fast road to extinction: you can't deny your way out of biophysical reality.

So what can we do, we who care deeply about passing an inhabitable - thriving - world to the generations not yet born?  We need to go...


Avoiding Burn Out, Fall Out, Drop Out (and Freak Out): Practical Routes to a whole, healed future with Dan McTiernan of Earthbound
#11
12/04/2024

How do we become the change we need to see in the world?  What are the actual, practical steps to grounding, connecting and resonating with the world?

We're on the brink of cataclysmic change.  Knowing this, we have choices: we can either fold into despair, terror, rage…whatever rises up in us as we watch the whole biosphere hurtle towards irrevocable tipping points. Or we can become the change we need to see in the world: each of us.  This is a cliché by now, but that doesn't stop it being true.  Here are others: we are the peo...


Adaptation is Here: Launching the TrAd (Transformative Adaptation) Book with Rupert Read and Morgan Philips
#10
11/27/2024

We're teetering on the brink of ecosystem and cultural collapse.  How do we adapt and transform to the changing realities?

This week sees the launch of a new book: Transformative Adaptation: Another world is still just possible. The main editors and contributors are friend of the podcast, author, activist and co-founder of the Climate Majority Project, Rupert Read and -  new to the podcast - Morgan Philips who is an educator, currently working for Global Action Plan, an environmental charity that mobilises people and organisations to take action on the systems that harm us and our planet.  Ful...